The Resort Years - 4

Go West, young man, go West!

One of the hardest decisions that Tom ever had to make was about leaving the security of IBM for the job in San Jose with a new “start-up” with a chance of “making it big!” when it succeeded or losing it all!  But when the FOR SALE sign brought a buyer in less than a week, we chose to see it as God’s Will that we up and move back to the West Coast.  Our stay in Poughkeepsie was exactly SIX MONTHS!  We also found a home in west San Jose near the mountains in three days - again under amazing circumstances.  And during nearly seven years in San Jose I never once wished for any other home, despite some parties and church functions in some really NICE, up-scale homes and amid growing success in the “new start up” in Sunnyvale.

So he had a six-mile commute to work, unless he was traveling and then we took him to and from San Francisco Airport and he traveled the globe working for Amdahl Corp, manufacturers of the next generation of computers.  It was an exciting adventure complete with stock options and the need for “tax shelters” and again the need for mountains.  “You can take the boy out of the mountains, but you can’t take the mountains out of the boy!”

After six and a half years of growing children and growing faith in God, volunteering at school, Cub Scouts, and church I was amazed to discover that we were going to buy an INN in the Sierra Nevada Mountains – a mile high hamlet called Strawberry, and I had never even WORKED in a restaurant, let alone a gas station, bar, hotel or trailer park!!  Tom had been reading ads in the papers:  ”How about a wine and cheese store in Santa Cruz?”  “How about a furniture manufacturing company in Idaho?”  I remarked that refinishing the credenza in the dining room and painting the boy’s room were the extent of my furniture making experience, (and I could see a cloud of sawdust around my head!!)

So Tom’s parents were visiting and the REALTOR who had gleefully met our airplane at the Columbia Airport several weeks before had called about TWO Inns that had come on the market recently.  Tom and his dad took the plane to check it out since I had a wedding to help with for the Church ladies and Mom could go with me.  Son Tom was fourteen, going on fifteen, so he could watch the other two siblings.  You can read all about THAT CHAPTER in “Three Weeks on a Hide-a-Bed – diary of a would be Innkeeper!” 

PRISONERS of a too cheap rental

The year that Kathleen started High School we were able to move to a small three-bedroom house in Strawberry from the apartment at the INN, turning our apartment into another rental unit or two!  The owners were renting the house to us at the rate of $425 per month, and we lived there for nineteen years!  Like our renters in South Pasadena we were able to change owners and still be the faithful renters, taking blocks of snow off the roof whenever the suspension shower rod crashed down - demonstrating that the weight of the snow on the roof was dangerous!

During our stay, besides changing owners, we helped to rebuild the front and back steps, painted all the rooms at least once, helped to take down the chimney and replace the fireplace with a bay window and a free-standing wood stove.  Most people thought that we OWNED that house, it didn’t look or feel like a “rental.”  The Shasta Daisies and other flowers still bloom each summer and we enjoy them on our walks.

Then ten or eleven years ago Tom felt the call to ministry and in our Methodist tradition lay people can and do become ministers – either ordained or just licensed until ordained if so desired.  So we moved to “another rental!” this one next to the Sonora United Methodist Church where Tom served as pastor for nine years while I wore the usual pianist and Sunday School teacher hats, doing services in the local congregation that I had done for most of the 52 years of our marriage.  I even got to preach a couple of times when Tom was down with the effects following a small seizure!  Again, we fixed whatever was broken, and treated it like our own home.  Leaving that for the one bedroom apartment in Strawberry brought back all the Colorado mountain memories.  Thank GOD that we still had this place to “fall back on” in our semi-retirement!  Thank GOD for the sons who helped and provided storage for our STUFF as Mom and Dad Weathers and McKee did while we lived in that little 12x24 mountain cabin above Denver, at 9600 feet.